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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

hypnosec writes "Authorities in Japan are presumably worried about their inability to tackle cybercrime and, in a bid to stem one of the sources of anonymous traffic, the National Police Agency (NPA) is asking ISPs to block Tor. The recommendation comes from the special panel formed by the NPA after a hacker going by the name Demon Killer was found to regularly use Tor to anonymize his online activities, like posting of death threats on public message boards."

An anonymous reader writes "What do you get mugged in Central London and the local police are too incompetent to find a mugger even with his address and photograph? You may not be able to get to the laptop, but you still own the photos and data on it, so you set up the NSFW Plumpergeddon blog which gives details of the subsequent 'owner's' 'Brick House Butts' fetishes. Now of course later the IT media might get interested and offer an interview with a promise to let him review the article and keep his name secret. luckily our hero is not so innocent and demonstrates the value of using a false name on the internet as well as planting your own monitoring software on your laptop."

First time accepted submitter thejezus writes "A spy cabinet has been exposed on a public road in The Hague, the Netherlands (Google translate here). The cabinet was disguised as telecom-cabinet and was detected by the maintenance crew of Ziggo (a triple-play provider) because it was not listed as a property of the company. Upon opening, it was revealed the cabinet contained a camera and UMTS equipment. Later that day, the cabinet disappeared. 1984 much?"

An anonymous reader writes "My Skype account was hijacked, which I discovered after Skype suspended it for suspicious activity, including a number of paid calls and an attempt to debit my card. Now that I've secured the account again, I can see the call history — there are several numbers called in Senegal, Mali, Benin and Philippines. Obviously I could call them myself and create a bit of havoc in their lives, but ideally I'd like to trace the hijacker himself — perhaps with some kind of 'social engineering' approach. Or is it just a waste of time?" How would you do this, and would you bother?

New submitter trims writes "The TSA is now in the public comment stage of its project to roll out Advanced Imaging Technology (i.e. full-body X-ray) scanners. The TSA wants your feedback as to whether or not this project should be continued or cancelled. Now is your chance to tell the TSA that this is a huge porkbarrel project and nothing more than Security Theater. You can comment at http:///www.regulations.gov and reference the docket ID TSA-2013-0004." Note: the backscatter X-ray machines are being phased out, in favor of millimeter-wave systems; the linked documents give the government's side of the story when it comes to efficacy, safety, privacy, and worth. The comment period runs until June 24.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "A woman who complained about an unpaid £146 invoice is facing a libel battle that could cost her more than £100,000. Lesley Kemp, 55, took to Twitter claiming that a company based in the Middle East had failed to pay her promptly for transcription work. Now the firm is suing Mrs Kemp, of Milton Keynes, for defamation, claiming up to £50,000 in damages and a further £70,000 in costs. The company, Resolution Productions, based in Qatar, has yet to comment."

Blug_fred writes "For the first year the Digital Freedom Foundation (ex-SFI) is organizing Hardware Freedom Day. With 66 events worldwide split over 36 countries, they are not yet covering the whole world but it is a good start. So if you have always been wondering about hacking your own stuff, be it a piece of wood or some more complex electronic gears then it is time to join an open door day type of event. Sixty-six events is definitely less that the total number of hackerspaces around the world and you can check for other events happening in a hackerspace near you if none are celebrating today. Hopefully they will join the movement next year."

Should Boston have been put in a state of lockdown on Friday as police chased down Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? Pragmatic Bruce Schneier writes on his blog: "I generally give the police a lot of tactical leeway in times like this. The very armed and very dangerous suspects warranted extraordinary treatment. They were perfectly capable of killing again, taking hostages, planting more bombs -- and we didn't know the extent of the plot or the group. That's why I didn't object to the massive police dragnet, the city-wide lock down, and so on." Schneier links to some passionate counterarguments, though. It doesn't escape the originator of a recurring movie plot terrorism contest that the Boston events of yesterday were just "the sort of thing that pretty much only happens in the movies."

alostpacket writes "The New York times reports that statistical scoring by the standardized testing company Pearson incorrectly disqualified over 4700 students from a chance to enter gifted / advanced programs in New York City schools. Only students who score in the 90th percentile or above are eligible for these programs. Those in the 97th or above are eligible for 5 of the best programs. 'According to Pearson, three mistakes were made. Students' ages, which are used to calculate their percentile ranking against students of similar age, were recorded in years and months, but should also have counted days to be precise. Incorrect scoring tables were used. And the formula used to combine the two test parts into one percentile ranking contained an error.' No mention of enlisting the help of the gifted children was made in the Times article, but it also contained a now-corrected error. This submission likely also contains an erro"

An anonymous reader writes "A new malware scheme has been discovered that pushes fake antivirus software to Android users via in-app advertising. Once installed, the trojan informs the victims they need to pay up to remove threats on their device. The malware in question, detected as "Android.Fakealert.4.origin" by Russian security firm Doctor Web, has been around since at least October 2012 according to the company. While Android malware that masks itself as an antivirus for Google's platform is nothing new, and neither are ads in Android apps pushing malware, but putting the two together can certainly be effective. This is naturally a practice that Windows users are all too familiar with."

New submitter LeadSongDog writes with news that Apple has provided information on how long it holds onto voice search data used by its digital assistant software Siri. Speaking to Wired, an Apple representative said the data is kept for two years after the initial query.
"Here’s what happens. Whenever you speak into Apple’s voice activated personal digital assistant, it ships it off to Apple’s data farm for analysis. Apple generates a random numbers to represent the user and it associates the voice files with that number. This number — not your Apple user ID or email address — represents you as far as Siri’s back-end voice analysis system is concerned. Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple “disassociates” your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file. But it keeps these disassociated files for up to 18 more months for testing and product improvement purposes."
This information came in response to requests for clarification of Siri's privacy policy, which was not very clear as written. The director of privacy group Big Brother Watch said, "There needs to be a very high justification for retaining such intrusive data for longer than is absolutely necessary to provide the service."

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Bitcoin's recent spike and then collapse in value has convinced many that it's too unstable to use as a practical currency. But not the founder of Silk Road, the black market drug site that exclusively accepts Bitcoin in exchange for heroin, cocaine and practically every other drug imaginable. Silk Road's creator, who calls himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, broke his usual media silence to issue a short statement that Silk Road will survive Bitcoin's bubble and bust. The market's prices are generally pegged to the dollar, with prices in Bitcoin fluctuating to account for movements in the exchange rate. And Roberts explained that vendors on the site have the option to also hedge the Bitcoins that buyers place in escrow for their products, so that they can't lose money due to Bitcoin's volatility while the drugs are in the mail. As a result, only about 1,000 of the site's more than 11,000 product listings were taken down during the recent crash."

Reader Okian Warrior points out a related story worthy of notice:
"The 4chan crowd, poring over images of the Boston marathon, identified two dark-skinned and bag-carrying suspects (among others). This was then picked up by The New York Post, who ran the image on Thursday's front page with the headline 'Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon.' And now, a completely innocent teen now finds himself scared to leave his home."

An anonymous reader writes "Google received an ultimatum Thursday from German consumer organizations that want it to start answering questions from its users via email. The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBV) has asked Google to sign an undertaking that it will provide customer service by responding individually to users questions sent by email, said Carola Elbrecht, VZBV's project manager for consumer rights in the digital world at the VZBV. Signing such a document would expose Google to fines if it breached the undertaking. On the other hand, said Elbrecht, 'If Google does not sign it, we're going to court.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The FBI has released images of what they say are two suspects with backpacks and ball caps. 'Somebody out there knows these individuals as friends, neighbors, co-workers or family members of the suspects,' Special Agent Rick DesLauriers, the head of the FBI's Boston office said. 'And though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those with information to come forward and provide it to us.'"

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Once again YouTube has defeated Viacom and other members of the content cartel; once again the Court has held that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act actually does mean what it says. YouTube had won the case earlier, at the district court level, but the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, although ruling in YouTube's favor on all of the general principles at stake, felt that there were several factual issues involving some of the videos and remanded to the lower court for a cleanup of those loose ends. Now, the lower court — Judge Louis L. Stanton to be exact — has resolved all of the remaining issues in YouTube's favor, in a 24-page opinion. Among other things Judge Stanton concluded that YouTube had not had knowledge or awareness of any specific infringement, been 'willfully blind' to any specific infringement, induced its users to commit copyright infringement, interacted with its users to a point where it might be said to have participated in their infringements, or manually selected or delivered videos to its syndication partners. Nevertheless, 5 will get you 10 that the content maximalists will appeal once again."

An anonymous reader links to an article at Ars explaining the dropping inventory of bridges available to users of the Tor project's encrypted messaging system. They're looking for more bridges, but that doesn't necessarily mean buying new hardware per se. From the article:
"After campaigning successfully last year to get more volunteers to run obfuscated Tor bridges to support users in Iran trying to evade state monitoring, the network has lost most of those bridges, according to a message to the Tor relays mailing list by Tor volunteer George Kadiankakis. 'Most of those bridges are down, and fresh ones are needed more than ever,' [Tor volunteer George] Kadiankakis wrote in an e-mail, 'since obfuscated bridges are the only way for people to access Tor in some areas of the world (like China, Iran, and Syria).' For those who want to donate bridges to the Tor network, the easiest route is to use Tor Cloud, an Amazon Web Service Elastic Compute Cloud image created by the Tor Project that allows people to leverage Amazon's free usage tier to deploy a bridge."